Paleontological and evolutionary studies indicate that the evolutionary history of taxa is important for predicting their fate when facing climate-related stresses. However, neither of these approaches cover the direction of temperature changes through time and their interactions. We show that taxa are particularly sensitive to same-directional temperature change over geologic time scales. Short-term temperature change adding to a long-term trend in the same direction (cooling-cooling, warming-warming) significantly increases extinction and origination probability for the majority of the studied clades.